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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

From a reflection on the decline of the British Empire, to a quintet of Beethoven piano concertos, there’s something for every ear

Early Music Vancouver: Terreno e vago: Music from 17th-century Italy at the Christ Church Cathedral
November 22, 8 p.m.

Even the best of summers only lasts so long; one of the consolations of our annual shift into the fall season is the hugely expanded list of classical music events available until holiday music takes over in December. Here are some selected highlights.

Autumn is not the traditional time for classical festivals, yet the VSO offers what amounts to a Beethoven mini-fest: pianist Yefim Bronfman performs all five piano concertos on four evenings mid-November through early December. While no one could argue that we don’t get lots of Beethoven in the regular course of our concert lives, the idea of hearing those landmark concertos in close proximity, and with the same soloist, is a good one. Beethoven conceived the pieces for his own use as performer; they are a compelling record of a composer’s journey from the conventions of the Classical era to the edge of Romanticism.

Other notable events

Early Music Vancouver: Canti di a Terra: Music from Corsica, Persia & Medieval Europe

Vancouver audiences have become more than a little familiar with ensembles that make fusion of different traditions a part of their shtick. As we are becoming increasingly aware, the line marking east and west was never as hard and fast as we used to think. Early Music Vancouver intends to explore music’s multicultural past with a sampler from Montreal’s Ensemble Constantinople and Barbara Furtuna, a male vocal quartet from Corsica.

The Chamber Choir offers a solid program of music by Handel (Let Thy Hand be Strengthened), Joseph Haydn (Missa Sancti Nicolai) and his overshadowed brother Michael (Tenebrae factae sunt), with some Mozart tucked in for good measure.

The new director of Vancouver Cantata Singers, Paula Kremer, makes her official debut with Fading Splendour, a program of music reflecting the long decline of the British Empire from the later decades of the 19th century to the middle years of the 20th, anchored by Vaughan Williams’s sublime Mass in G minor. In an instance of music matching venue, the VCS performs in our own architectural relic of end-of-Empire attitudes: downtown’s Christ Church Cathedral.

Music on Main: Modulus Festival

Oct. 21-25, various times | Heritage Hall and the Atrium at the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre

As ever, there’s a lot of ground being covered at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival: Schubert’s Winterreise (in an English translation); new music by Michael Oesterle and Thomas Adès; not so new music by Steve Reich (his iconic Drumming); JS Bach, Thomas Tallis, and Bartok; and a premiere of new songs by Music on Main composer-in-residence Jocelyn Morlock. It’s all a stylistic mix up, and that’s just the way committed MoM listeners like it.

Francis Poulenc was one of 20th century music’s more enigmatic voices in art song, opera, and chamber music. Many of his choral works are an idiomatic conjunction of serious religious feeling and fashionable technique. The Vancouver Symphony’s Classical Traditions series showcases two great choral works: the Litanies to the Black Madonna and the more popular Gloria. Members of the VSO and the Vancouver Bach Choir will be under the direction of Simon Wright for this event, which also includes works by Haydn and Mozart.

Though Vancouver Opera will offer a postscript to this year’s centenary celebration of Benjamin Britten with a run of his only comic opera Albert Herring in late November, its season starts out with Puccini’s Tosca. If you like your opera big and melodramatic, this is just the thing — an operatic re-telling of what was originally a Sarah Bernhardt vehicle. With the superb Jonathan Darlington conducting, you can be assured of fine work on the musical side of things.

One of the darkest chapters in all music history is up for exploration in the Turning Point Ensemble’s fall show, a program of music the Nazis loved to hate: “degenerate” works by Hindemith and Weill feature (who can resist cheeky music from the latter’s Threepenny Opera?) as well as revivals of works by Pavel Haas and Erwin Schulhoff, two composers who perished in concentration camps.

So here’s a first: a recital for the Vancouver Chopin Society without a single work by the Polish master on the official program. French pianist Bavouzet essays a finely thought-out program with lots of non-Romantic rewards: sonatas by Beethoven and Bartok, preludes by Debussy, and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.

Ensemble Pallade Musica, a young group out of Montreal which won the 2012 Early Music America Baroque Performance Competition in New York, makes its West Coast debut with splendid music from the early baroque for violin, cello, and basso continuo.

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